The Conversation: Sam Rockwell

Sharing a Pop-Tart with Hollywood's least-known great actor

Sam Rockwell is sitting on the stoop of his girlfriend's tidy pastel house in Studio City, California — a wrinkled burgher with a beat-up cowboy hat and a slight paunch. After waving us in, the star of Choke, Moon, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and the new Conviction (in theaters October 15) — with Hilary Swank, about a man wrongly imprisoned and the sister who sees justice served — leads us to the backyard. He picks up one of those heavy-ass poly-resin wicker chairs, muscles it to the back of the lot beneath an overhanging tree. We do the same. Sadie the dog joins us. She belongs to Leslie Bibb, who you might remember as Ricky Bobby's red-hot smokin' wife or Iron Man's intrepid journalist Christine Everhart.

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ESQUIRE: I brought this homemade cinnamon Pop-Tart from the gelato place around the corner.

SAM ROCKWELL: Wow. That looks amazing. Look at the sugar glistening.

ESQ:Life is short. Don't you always wish you could eat a Cinnabon at every airport?

SR: I don't know, man. It was a lot of enchiladas and margaritas this summer. We were in Santa Fe [shooting Cowboys & Aliens with Jon Favreau and Daniel Craig]. There might have been a tiny bit of overindulgence. Now we're shooting here. I need to clean it up, you know?

ESQ:You're worried you'll appear blimplike by the end of the movie?

SR: You hit 41 and you don't burn calories like you used to.

ESQ:Your parents were actors. You've been acting since you were young. You've done a zillion movies and turned in some amazing performances. But you're not exactly a household name. More of a household face. Like Steve Buscemi used to be.

SR: I've done so many independents for so many years. Leads that nobody's seen.

ESQ:Are you at peace with that? You work all the time.

SR: I took a break after Confessions. I was real picky. And then I suddenly realized I hadn't worked in a year. And I was sort of like not really happy. I think people are happier when they have structure, you know? You realize that as you get older. You have to have rituals and structure.

ESQ:Like your character in Moon. Stranded on the dark side.

SR: Exactly. Whether we like it or not, we're still hamsters in a cage, and we got to kind of figure out what the fuck to do with our time. So you might as well work. What else am I going to do for the summer? Go to the gym?

ESQ:Do you ever wonder, Maybe I deserve more?

SR: Everybody wonders that. It can eat you alive unless you deal with it. You're rewarded in the long run. Movies like Galaxy Quest and Assassination of Jesse James and even Confessions — they don't do well at the time but they catch on later. Even Choke, you know, it's got like a little bit of a cult following now, I think.

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ESQ:Cult is good. Cult is badass. It's the coin of the realm. Maybe it's time to try the Pop-Tart.

SR: We can break bread. I can't eat the whole thing.

ESQ:Go ahead.

SR: I'm going to take this little bit here.

ESQ:Your fingers — some are weird.

SR: Oh, yeah. Well, I had a car accident. I got some things from playing with the guns in Cowboys & Aliens.

ESQ:Some flash burns?

SR: Yeah. And I box a little. Sometimes I get calluses.

ESQ:So what happened in the accident?

SR: I flipped a car. I think the same thing sort of happened to Shia LaBeouf, except his hand was hurt worse than mine, but my fingers were crushed and then reconstructed.

At 18, she was nominated for best supporting actress for her role in Cape Fear. She was in Kalifornia, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Natural Born Killers. Then she started a band (Juliette and the Licks), played a DJ in Grand Theft Auto IV, and starred in a string of indie movies you probably didn't see. But she's back: This month she's in Due Date as a pot dealer. And she has scenes with Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell in Conviction. She doesn't steal the movie — she plays a white-trash perjurer; the dental prosthesis alone is worth the experience — but put it this way: "People on the set were doing impressions of Juliette doing her character," says Rockwell. "That's the greatest flattery. Hilary was doing her. Minnie Driver was doing her. She tore it up."

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